Reporting on Gender-Based Violence War through the Lens of Women: A Reporter’s Diary

As a human rights journalist from Slovakia, I have been trying to write about the impact of the Russian war in Ukraine on Ukrainian women for several years. Since the very first days of the full-scale war, I’ve been observing patterns of abuse, but also crimes of opportunity, perpetrated by the Russian troops as well as by individuals of various nationalities preying on women in situations of vulnerability.

I remember reporting from Kharkiv when the full-scale war broke out. Being a woman, even if you enjoy certain privileges as a foreign reporter, is always difficult in a war. After Putin delivered his speech at 4 am, launching the greatest war in Europe since World War II, I witnessed and felt panic I had never experienced before. The Russian tanks hadn’t even arrived inside the city of Kharkiv, and I was already approached by a man who was living in the same hotel as me. He asked me for sex. He was confident and certain he’d survive — I wasn’t. This man was probably experiencing a rush of adrenaline and excitement — and I was preparing for rape or death. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to think about sex while a large attack was imminent. But such is the nature of war. It only took me a few hours to understand that, as of now, my rights as a woman had shrunk.

That early realization — that war destroys not only countries but also the boundaries of safety for women — stayed with me as I continued reporting. It became clear that what I had experienced was not an isolated experience, but part of a broader, recurring pattern that would follow me across places and stories.

I am from Slovakia, and I returned to my home country three weeks after the full-scale war broke out in Ukraine. It was March 2022. I had heard reports of men preying on women and child refugees at the Slovak-Ukrainian border, and of cases of human trafficking. Perhaps because I was in my own country, in the small capital of Bratislava, it didn’t occur to me that such crimes against women might be unfolding there on a massive scale. Slightly naive, I went to the train station to see whether there were any suspicious-looking individuals. That day, three different men approached me, asking me to come with them. I was a woman wandering alone around the train station, and they thought I was a Ukrainian refugee. That day, I also understood the real scale of “crimes of opportunity.”

What I had first perceived as scattered incidents began to form a continuum. The war did not create these dynamics, but it amplified them, exposing how quickly vulnerability can be exploited when systems collapse and people are displaced.

I started covering violence against women in Ukraine, a topic dear to my heart. Among my first investigations, I covered how Ukrainian women and girls were trafficked or exploited through the job market in Europe. But even when women are exploited for work and not for sex, I noted, they often find themselves at risk of sexual exploitation. I remember the story of Angelika from Mariupol, who was living in an old, dirty building next to a factory in Slovakia where she was supposed to work. In the building, she would hear other male workers having sex with women at night. Angelika had fled Ukraine with her young daughter, Jana. She forbade Jana to go to the bathroom and toilet alone.

Over the next months, I also investigated how Ukrainian women were exploited for cleaning, cooking, and sex in exchange for accommodation in Slovakia and in the Czech Republic. I also looked at cases of domestic violence on Ukraine’s frontlines, and what options women and children had when they were fleeing their abusers while Russia was pounding their hometowns with airstrikes.

Yet even these accounts — numerous and deeply disturbing — were only the beginning of the full scope of what women experience in war. Beyond exploitation and coercion lies a more systematic, deliberate form of rape and fear, used as a tactic to harm and annihilate. Sexual violence, torture, and humiliation — even against the most vulnerable women and girls — is one of the most brutal forms of violence in the world, qualified as a crime against humanity. It is happening in Ukraine on a large scale.

I covered stories of women impregnated by Russian troops who are now raising babies who look like their abusers. I reported on a woman who had been asphyxiated and gang-raped by Russian troops while she was unconscious. And on another one, who said she was raped along with other women in captivity in an occupied part of Ukraine, while the Russian soldiers were telling them: “We have to rape you so that you become Russian women.”

I even reported on a case of a bed-bound, non-verbal woman who was stripped and sexually assaulted by Russian troops. Such cruelty was unimaginable to me before. 

Throughout my reporting, I have seen, again and again, how Russian soldiers intentionally harmed even the most defenceless.

According to UN Women, rape committed as a weapon of war is not merely a crime of opportunity, but a “deliberate tactic of warfare” that reaches unthinkable levels of cruelty against women of all ages, from infants to grandmothers. “It is perhaps more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict,” wrote Major General Patrick Cammaert, former UN Division Commander for Eastern DRC.

And yet, focusing only on violence risks reducing women to what has been done to them. Over time, I found myself questioning how to report on these stories without reducing the complexity of the lives behind them.

My respect and admiration for the women of Ukraine, who, despite the staggering levels of violence, continue to live, fight, dream, raise their children, write, and speak, is immense after all of my reporting experiences. My time at INDEX in Lviv allowed me to focus on their resilience, rather than victimhood. It shifted my perspective from documenting harm to also recognising strength, endurance, and the ways women continue to move forward.

This shift also made me more aware of the limitations of traditional reporting formats. Media outlets often don’t have the space needed to recount all the gendered aspects of war in their full depth and complexity.

Many of these stories remain underreported, fragmented, or reduced — but they are just as important as what is happening on the front lines. Women’s lives are a direct reflection of the cruelty of the war — and of the courage of those who combat it.

The illustrations featured in the essay are from the sketchbooks of Ukrainian artist and service member Ivan Hubenko. He started sketching after joining the army to make up for the lack of constant artistic practice.